We've Got to Try by Beto O'Rourke

Author:Beto O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

6

Fort Bend County

In July 2018, as a construction team in Sugar Land, Texas, prepared land for a new public school facility, a backhoe operator noticed what looked like a human bone in the ground.

Construction was immediately halted, and archeologists were brought in.

The ensuing investigation uncovered something bigger than that bone in the topsoil: an unmarked burial ground that contained the remains of ninety-five Black men and boys, aged fourteen to seventy.

These bodies might have been a surprise to the construction team and the school district that had selected this ground for its new building, but they weren’t a surprise to a man named Reginald Moore.

Moore had worked as a prison guard in Fort Bend in the late 1990s. And the more he learned about the history of the prison at which he worked and the community in which it was located, the more interested he became in the stories of those who had been locked up there.

He learned that the inmates in his care were incarcerated on the same land as generations of inmates before them, including those who had been imprisoned during the era of convict leasing—a practice that once allowed the state of Texas to essentially “rent out” incarcerated people to farms, ranches, plantations, and construction companies. It also happened to be the same land where enslaved Texans worked right before the end of the Civil War.

Moore drew the connections between the enslaved, the leased, and the currently incarcerated—and saw from the inside that there was deep injustice within the system of justice.

He also came to the conclusion that people so disrespected by society when they were alive were destined to receive no better treatment in death. It was no shock to him, then, that so many had been buried in unmarked graves under the very ground upon which he made his rounds.

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